


Bend of Your Hand

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 09:46:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4216983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Masako visits Alex in LA.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bend of Your Hand

Masako first visits Alex in the summer, when she actually has a few contiguous weeks of vacation and when she’s growing the most restless, with the weather and with the preparation for the heaviest part of the basketball season and with being physically alone. Even her small, minimally-furnished apartment feels too big, as if all the rooms are cavernous and the distance between her and the nearest tangible physical presence is too long, across chasms without bridges. She tells herself that it’s stupid and paranoid but the feeling doesn’t go away and Alex doesn’t come any closer and before she knows it she’s purchasing her round-trip tickets.

It’s both how she’s imagined it and not, the way she’s seen in pictures and heard Alex talk about it (in so many ways it’s very Alex in its messiness and mishmash of parks and sleek new buildings and crumbling old, flat sprawl, with the traffic on jammed freeways and busy streets moving so slowly it almost seems aimless) but with so many surprising details, colors and bending roads leading places she’s not sure they could go and the haze in the sky like a shitty imitation of clouds as described to aliens from a planet with a different elemental composition. And then there are the beaches, the wash of the waves of the same ocean she’s been to so many times but only seen from the other side.

They go down to the ocean all day her third day there; it’s the hottest so far but Masako still wears a long sundress anyway, in part because she’s too lazy to slather sunscreen all the way up her legs and in part because neither of them wants to do much more than wade. Nevertheless, Alex comes in her faded green bikini with the fraying halter top, smears white lotion all over her body but doesn’t rub it in all the way on her face and chest and Masako wonders for a very brief second if she did it on purpose and she wants to be touched—but she’s not wearing her glasses and that kind of thing isn’t her style (although she doesn’t mind Masako’s fingers rubbing circles under her collarbone, swiping across her cheek and up the side of her face like she’s unlocking a cell phone).

Alex’s freckles, faded in the winter months, are evident now, a muddier version of cayenne flakes scattered across her back in the sunlight. She groans when Masako touches them, rubbing the suntan lotion into her back and up the back of her neck, under the strap of her bathing suit and out on the other side—her hair’s already swept up like a wave the same color as the sand into a lazy knot revealing the skin beneath it; her hairline cuts jagged like a shark tooth against her skin. She reaches up to grab Masako’s greasy fingers, and even though Masako could slip them out frictionless, she leaves them. Alex turns her head to squint in the light.

“Come lie down?”

Alex’s arm falls across Masako’s stomach, finding the contours of her body under the linen of her dress before she buries her head back into the towel. The freckles on her arm seem to form a spiral like the inside of a smooth seashell unfurled and spread out, curling at the edges on a softer kind of semi-spiral. The murmur of voices and mingling of music and crashing of the waves form an almost pleasant harmony among themselves, and Alex’s breathing unfurls softly against her, the expansion and contraction of her chest and the feeling of her breath against Masako’s cheek.

* * *

 

She buys Masako churros from the boardwalk and then steals a couple of bites herself; Masako hits her on the nose with the bitten-off end of a churro and then Alex kisses her, briefly and sweet enough to leave granules of sugar against the insides of Masako’s lips. Alex wrinkles her nose; there’s still some sugar clinging to the end and Masako smiles in satisfaction. Her hand uncurls into Alex’s and their thumbs rub against one another half-accidentally but purely appropriate for the situation.

It’s a long time until the sun sets even though it feels like the day is ready to let go already; even if all they did was lie on the beach and then go for a walk together and even if they’d only had to reapply sunscreen twice time has still moved oddly. Masako half-expects to look at the cover of a newspaper and see a date from next week, but it’s all as it should be. It’s almost too good to be true, but it is true, so as she pulls her churros away to keep them out of Alex’s reach, she leans in for another kiss. After that Alex stops trying quite so hard to grab another bite.

* * *

 

Asphalt feels the same under her shoes here; it doesn’t matter how hot or how cold or what continent she’s on because this kind of surface is always going to be itself. It’s where Alex plays; it’s where her students play and she’s convinced Masako to come to one of her informal lessons. The kids are younger than she’s used to working with and she doesn’t know English and most of them don’t know Japanese, so she’s not quite sure what she should do. Alex just squeezes her hand and tells her to follow her lead, to demonstrate—this she can do, pass the ball back and forth and go in for the routine layups and the normal unguarded jumpers, the basic dribbles and blocks right along with Alex.

Still, Alex says they want her to show them something special she knows.

“Like a move or something? Should I?”

Alex grins and nods. “Show them what you’ve got.”

And even though the kids surround her after her quick sharp-angle fadeaway, jabbering in sentences Masako can barely separate into distinct words, it’s the glowing grin on Alex’s face that matters, the exhilaration in her eyes of seeing something she hasn’t seen up close before, the kiss she blows at Masako from across the court (although that last one is more than a little bit embarrassing, but no one probably saw and Masako can’t really be angry at Alex for this).

* * *

Alex rents her a motorcycle, not even close to the right model but it’ll do when they take the scenic route through the city, slowly circling blocks and neighborhoods as Masako begins to get the structure of its layout in her mind. They go up into the mountains a couple of the nights, but it’s nothing compared to what’s just outside of Akita, so they turn back. And Masako takes the long way back, not because she’s forgotten the short way but because there’s something about Alex’s arms around her waist, even through a jacket, something that makes her feel warm inside, as if her heart is going off like a motorcycle engine, heating everything around it as it goes faster and faster.

**Author's Note:**

> lmao this is my farewell to this challenge. it doesn't challenge me enough to not write the same story over and over again


End file.
